Snier chuckled while handing up a goblet. “That story made it all the way to Pelliul.”

  “You’re kidding? Yeah, I’d probably have enough money for tuition by now if it weren’t for that storm of torches and hymns. But, yeah, back when Mr. Belot hired me, it was simple: More bodies for him, more coin from him. I kept anything I found—which was usually nothing but worm shit—and he got first crack at the haul.”

  Jumping out of the hole, “And for that there was a wage?”

  “And a decent one,” jumping down to cut off noble ears. “Of course, there was more to it.”

  “Not sure I want to know,” Snier said.

  “It’s a shame Belot’s gone. Probably dead.”

  “Seaz, I got to finally ask it. What the hell does taking apart a few stiffs over and over have anything to do with becoming a doctor? Why not—”

  —We were on their bellies. Out from nowhere a clamor of mounted watchmen had appeared. One said “Opium smell,” thankfully riding right past us and then disappearing.

  We slithered all the way back to the oak.

  Once on the streets my heart pounded less erratically. I con-tinued, “For practice. So, yeah, I worked for him about a year, then he just vanished like he went up in smoke. Metaphorically apt too, I found signs there’d been a fire where he usually worked. Somyellia thinks Belot disappeared because this one vile man he had me take care of may have had even viler friends.”

  “Fires. Vile friends. Somyellia hasn’t pieced it all together? She’s from folk not too far off from your Mr. Belot.”

  “Only folk of hers I’ve ever met is that onion-headed cousin, Irion. Always tasking her out with brews and broths. I ask her what for and she just clams up and tells me family business.”

  —

  We made it home and divided the spoil, as we always did. No fuss. No squabble. The haul put food in the gullet, but greater things called. Not long after, Snier broke the news to me that he’d had his fill of grave dirt. I’d made a friend. I’d cared for the little thief from Pelliul, but as is my fate, like Belot, he too would vanish.

  VI: The Pauper Morgue

  I am Seasmil, and Death has followed me from an early age. Mother and Celly had left the world in different ways, but stalked my dreams equally. Death was as a part of life to me as was ink to a book. So when I found Somyellia dead on our floor I didn’t scream. Life owes us nothing.

  She had died suddenly, without warning, at the hand of a ruthless venereal disease. Carried coolly by men but cursing the innards of females, I knew this from the blood that had let from all her orifices and pooled over the symbols she’d repainted. Although I had to be a carrier, she was most likely infected while working her trade.

  In this moment she was terribly beautiful, her nose and mouth spilling forth blood as wicked as her ancestors that danced under the winter moon. Those golden eyes stared at me as if to ask one final question. Her skin was still warm under the robe she sometimes wore when practicing her finer craft.

  I lifted her off the floor. Her head hung far back and her hair waggled in her blood, like the fine tip of a large paintbrush. Hugging her was all one could do. Silence. I had never been in a place so quiet, not even the old cellar or the furthermost grave.

  My own blood roared. I told myself she’d gone back to revel with her kind; wrought not of our world. And though this made me feel no better, after a moment the silence seemed broken by echoes from some far off place, a place I partly understood her to be. All of this could have been my own wishful thinking, of course; maybe the worms were the last to taste my sweet Somyellia.

  I laid her on her side of the bed and went through her satchel. After, I went through our drawers and chests.

  With a handful of silver, I laid beside her. She’d never once spoken about her burial wishes, an amazing feat considering the nature of our usual talks. She may have wanted a spiraling funeral pyre, an obsidian mausoleum, to be hacked to bits and fed to the night creatures she loved so dearly.

  I kept her for days. Telling myself I was waiting on Irion worked for a little while. He was, after all, the only family member she’d ever introduced me to, and proper burial was I figured a family affair. But he never came, and as a day or two passed that reasoning melted away. Not being able to say goodbye stood firmly in its place.

  To clean her meant moving her to the kitchen table. I walked around her studiously, solemnly; death had managed to steal many of the features we are so accustomed to.

  An urge entered me as I circled the table. Pulling apart her legs, now heavy and cold, I positioned myself. In all the sexual voyages between us, all the desecration of graves, and juices spent, I’d never done this. How could I? She had on occasion teased me of my appetite, and joked I was capable of such “selfish indulgences.”

  As usual, she was right. I entered a place that was always so inviting and warm, now a rough tunnel. In the midst of my efforts I heard grunting. I believed for just a moment that I had thrusted her back to life. It was I who grunted, and the moment’s realization came right as I did.

  I wrapped her in a sheet and prepared to enter the streets. Much coaxing and the coins I’d scrounged up days earlier got me a mule to carry Somyellia to the Pauper Morgue.

  Taking her to a place designated for the nameless and faceless forgotten made me ill to the core. Hooded, in midday, I took the laden mule down Red Wolf, over the little white bridges that ran through Nilghorde Commerce, past the Tower of the Waning Moon, and finally through winding roads that made the strange district called the The Dead Kettle.

  Arriving at the front offices of the morgue, I tethered the mule and stared up at the fat man’s nearby tower we’d once raided. Since then it had withered terribly, as if the ultimate perversions once contained within had howled free, leaving the rook beaten by decay beyond the normal brutality of the sun and rain.

  I carried Somyellia through the doors of the Pauper Morgue. The transaction was as brief as one would expect. Then a pair of pale bald men took her.

  Looking at these two, if you saw them you would find them disgusting and queer, and not be ashamed of it. Stubby legs supported flab up to the neck, and pouty bottom lips held spittle ready to drip. It was too easy to see the types of men that had paid Somyellia over the years. Just as easily, to see them mongering over her body the moment my back was turned. Eventually letting go of my knife’s handle, I helped them unwrap her from the sheet.

  “What do you want on the tombstone?” the shorter one asked.

  Throughout the years, I have read dozens of excerpts in poems and books, the ones loaded with saccharine romancing, and I wished I’d used a number of them. Particularly striking was a line out of Songs in Regal Twilight, authored by Vandahl five hundred years before I was born. At the time, though, all I could do was fight back a surge of tears and scribble out what was clawing:

  SOMYELLIA ORDRID

  CAPTOR OF MANY HEARTS, RULER OF ONE

  A Black Lamb In Your Arms Do I Hope To Find You

  “Good sir,” the taller one said, sounding a degree more elegant than his counterpart and pulling me back to the world. “We are looking to replace an employee…very soon. The position requires the ability to read and write.”

  “Skills elusive to many willin’ to work here,” the short one said.

  “We don’t mean to ask you this without regard to the tragedies that befell you,” the tall one said, brushing a hand over Somyellia, “but we need a strong back most urgently.”

  I don’t know if I had death written on my face. Maybe these little trolls, so close to it on a daily basis, were able to see things others couldn’t. This opportunity seemed to fall out of the sky and onto the lap of a man well-adjusted to life’s apathy. This was so harmoniously ideal that my shift to excitement with the smell of Somyellia still on my skin pelted me with guilt.

  Who was she really, though? Mocking her by remembering the version that suited me best held no love or honor. She was strong in life, and surely would laugh hideously at my weakened state. She would have nodded with that haunting nod, then “Do it, lover.” Whereever she was, she had no need for my indecision.

  Yes, this is how I got here.

  Telling them I accepted made them smile—sluggy, melted smiles—and when they told me the wages I almost danced on the ceiling. I wasn’t going to rival the vaults of the ruling, but by my quick arithmetic, in a year I would be able to enroll at the Institute.

  The former mortician was gone in no time. The first few days were shadowing the two waddling managers. My workspace was the morgue itself, vast and set back from the street. Inside, its walls made a stone honeycomb that contained bodies in all sizes and conditions. At its center, where I’d spend most of my time, was the table.

  Above my station, the domed ceiling was a cap of painted glass. Hilarious in its irony, it depicted the poor and pious being whisked away by serene carriers to some orange and golden field. Waiting for them, Tersiona sat in a throne of wheat, surrounded by Ansul and a ring of lesser figures. By day, the ceiling provided a glowing vale of sunlight, and on the nights I chose not to go home, church icons holding books and teapots glared down on my solitude.

  Following a downhill path, my designated cart was to be led to an iron door on the northern edge of the cemetery, an edge well known to me. This door was much like a cellar hatch, bolted on a granite frame leading to the Pauper Vault. The dead poor were dropped to reside forever with carrion, foulness, and things that scampered from the light. Even for me, the stench that belched up from that darkness didn’t only offend the nostrils, but clawed at the skin and smothered.

  Continuing downhill were the graves for those buried with just enough money to avoid the filling pit. And there was Somyellia.

  At the end of my first day, I went down to see her. I sat at her graveside and stared across the sea of weathered stone teeth. Across the vast distance, through the gleaming spires of Laugher’s Lot, I could make out our abandoned house, a speck that was once our grandest meeting place.

  Pain exposes itself when it chooses to, and as most harden with the passing years it becomes an indistinguishable part of life. I leaned against her brand new stone and wept. It’s like Vandahl wrote: “Life is but wild flowers in the graveyard.”

  A void in me was undeniably ripped open after Somyellia left. Perhaps that is why I fell into my work so. I enjoyed the sweating from the lifting, all legal for the first time.

  It became a routine: inspect the day’s load, tend the horse assigned to the morgue, attach her to the cart, throw a body on the table, report, hoist it into said cart, repeat. The short report was more gratifying than any bundle of obscure notes I’d made on my own. Cause of death—best guess sufficed, physical description, name (if known), a few other details, and then on to the next.

  My bosses, I came to find out, were Qells; a once magnificent house that had long rotted away from lordship. They were pleased by my performance. So much so, in fact, that after only a month they never stepped foot in the morgue again. Their time was better spent in the front office, delving into the keepsakes of freshly brought bodies, dealings with cutthroats, and occasionally supporting the coup of some ambitious rising figure.

  Though Snier and Somyellia were gone, I remained in my studio, or I should say my possessions did. The Pauper Morgue became my real home—as the commoners who pass out bread rather than the blade say, “It’s where the heart lies.” Sleeping on a mat of blankets in a favored corner, book in hand, and well-fed from lamplight was my only joy. Street murmurs crawled back to me that, not long after taking employment, an attentive group of urchins took me for evicted or dead. I laugh at the thought of them burgling only to run headlong into my ferine collections.

  Some bodies at the morgue needed dissection to root out cause of death. In no time, I bore witness to the many malfunctions of our vulnerable flesh. Diseases that attached to organs, fiercely and without remorse, always made me miss her something awful.

  The few bodies that were to accompany tombstones I’d separate early. Piling them like a stack of fingered and footed firewood reminded me a lot of Belot’s place. Once filled, the cart would go to the mass grave and I’d play the game of trying to drop them in ways that would achieve the greatest cracks and thuds. Most memorable, I once invoked a peculiar squeal, after which I softly closed the door and backed away.

  My bosses relished the tight-lipped approach. I was met with freedom, more coin, and ample food. My predecessor, I imagined, must have expressed some grievance with their dealings, and I wondered what hill of bones in that subterranean pit he occupied.

  In time, I surmised they thought I killed Somyellia. In addition to being tolerant of murder, with my literary skills and build, they figured me the perfect subordinate. I never confirmed this, but a mind educated by both the works of scholars and the streets possesses the ability to cut through clout and inanities like a robber’s knife.

  Much like a child enamored in summer, I lost track of time. Weeks became months, and those too seemed to fly by with the wave of dead that gave me my livelihood.

  You would have thought Nilghorde would have been desolate in a mere season. No matter the ebb and flow, the city remained as bustling and lively as ever. The occasional stroll to my studio would take me up Red Wolf, examining the living with new eyes. “I wonder when I’ll be seeing you?” I’d sometimes say, a couple of times too loud.

  My so-called experiments ceased entirely. Dreams of becoming a doctor were barely an afterthought. A bill on a dusty shelf.

  Though dead, Somyellia had not left my heart nor my habits. Nights I would wake to see her gliding from a darkened corner of the morgue. It ended as soon as my mind took the step out of the world of dream and into the forever disappointing world we temporarily occupy. It exposed life’s pallid and stagnant nature, a few punishing seasons of hot and cold. These visions were only a phase, possibly due to another phase of mine, one in which a young womanly corpse would be examined for far too long, though never treated to the carnal activities that had closed my one and only love.

  My existence had met a livable rhythm. I’d never expected, or wanted, the sun-soaked slogging of many who claim to live the good life. I knew from an early age I was meant to dwell in other passions. I had money for the few things that interested me. I fought a small war with opium and won, resulting in an additional layer of meat on my hide. I read endlessly, making sure to visit libraries and vendors of the book and scroll. The dead had befriended me, and while sitting among the morgue’s more comfortable nooks I often fell asleep leaned against their silent company.

  VII: The Ritual

  On the anniversary of Somyellia’s death, I abandoned my duties to sit beside her grave. The bouquet of roses and lilies I had laid were for the day. The wreath of coiled orphedilias, for the coming night.

  Staring at her stone, some lettered grooves had been corrupted by a year’s mold. As I scraped the mold with my fingernails, I remembered. It’s funny how the bereaved mind rushes back to the last time we’ve seen the dead when they were not. I was certainly no exception.

  —

  All Malevolent Masquerade was always our favorite holiday. She’d told me the party at the Rogaire mansion had gone off without a hitch, but I was still sour that I had to spend the night elsewhere. Duty came first, she’d said, but she’d also mused how she too would have much rather joined me on the one night a year the proper spilled into graveyards and disreputable bars, banging drums, running up tabs, puking on headstones, and cutting up roasted pigs while dressed as goblins and muskrats.

  Somyellia lay in bed with her eyes shut. Some nighttime clamor out on Red Wolf had distracted her, but she’d resumed one of her fonder pastimes. She dug her hand through the jar of severed tongues. Pulling a shriveled one out and giving it a good lick, “Thee neighborly would be less incorrigible if it weren’t for those drat newcomers, by rights,” said Somyellia. One more, swollen and still holding its redness, proved to be decidedly male. “Not that bonnet, woman! Makes you look a frumpish bar trout,” she boomed, and then her voice returned to normal. “Lovely stuff.”

  I stood there, drying my hair. “So we’re going to be swimming in silver soon for all this?”

  “More to life than metal,” lidding the jar, “one as keen for stomach tubes and finger bones as you knows this,” Somyellia said. “Don’t sound too Chapwyn on me.” I tossed a severed hand that we used for intimate petting off the bed and flopped down beside her. “Mediocre in the many ways that he may be,” Somyellia continued, “Irion easily dominated the Rogaire prison master. Asking for a guard change and an escort out of that lovely dungeon was no harder than robbing graves in a blind man’s graveyard with a silent shovel.”

  As she came up on her hands and knees, the window above our bed held the night. She studied the angle of the moon. I studied the sleek dip of her back and bare buttocks. “It’s almost time,” she said, staying me and hopping toward her wardrobe.

  “It’s a wonder that termite-eaten box doesn’t explode,” I said. Rummaging through the clutter, she swung out ribbons of dazzling green before tossing it in the trash.

  “Sexy lizard costume?” I snickered.

  “Ansul’s ass, don’t make me relive it.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Told you, my beast, I introduced Irion and Morlia years ago.”

  “Eight years.”

  “You do listen. And soon, as you know, after they’d met they agreed Morlia’d approach that dim prison master. Who knows, it could have been my tasking if Morlia hadn’t been so insistent,” giving the rummage a rest, her eyes sparkled, “but, of course, I would have tactfully explained I was already so uncompromisingly taken. But I knew it would work well. The weak charm Irion drenched her in probably wasn’t even needed.”